


Blend and Clash

by shinobi93



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-16
Updated: 2012-09-16
Packaged: 2017-11-14 09:17:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/513679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinobi93/pseuds/shinobi93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because their lines diverged doesn't mean the story is over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blend and Clash

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Barthes' infamous essay 'The Death of the Author'. No, I don't know why I've started using literary criticism to name fics either.
> 
> My own attempt at the TSN fandom's favourite pastime: 'fixing' the end of the movie to try and lessen the heartbreak.

Mark was there, standing outside his hotel room with a worried look on his face, and Eduardo didn’t know what to do. They’d reached the stage where they could politely make small talk in company and just smile awkwardly and say hello if they weren’t. It wasn’t much, but he’d assumed that’d be the way they’d stay, distant but with their spheres overlapping ever so slightly. Harvard was a long time ago now.

Back then, of course, the circles in the Venn diagram of their lives were languishing over one another, or perhaps more accurately someone had cut open each circle and entwined the resulting lines. At times it was functioning to the point of disfunction, with Wardo forcing Mark to eat and sleep and live and in return, Mark would do those things for almost nobody else. They had no need to compare their friendship to any typical standards.

_“Mark,” Eduardo urged. “Take a break. Sleep, watch TV, bitch about the idiots in your systems class, whatever, but stop with the laptop.”_

_Mark, wild-eyed and still working away at a problem in his head, looked up. “ ‘right, Wardo, I’ll stop.”_

_Fifteen minutes later, Mark threw himself down on the bed next to Eduardo. Mark’s bed, but Wardo had been sitting there all evening, reading a huge economics book and reminding his best friend to eat. They slumped against each other, a physical reminder of their mutual reliance and above all, proof that it was 3am. Slowly, sleepily, their lips met. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. Just one more way in which they leaned on one another._

_They’d wake in the morning in a tangle of limbs, not embarrassed at all, Dustin and Chris not saying anything because, well, they were Mark and Eduardo, that’s just what they did._

Eduardo still hadn’t spoken, was just staring at the sight greeting him from the corridor. The outfit looked smarter than Mark’s usual look, which wasn’t surprising as they’d both been at the same meeting earlier in the day, the same evening function with the same dreary people.

“It’s late,” he stated, for want of a better topic.

“Yes,” agreed Mark, with the ‘obviously’ left floating in space, a remnant of their distant past. “I lied, said I was you, and they told me the room number,” he added in response to the unasked question. “Very lax.”

Obviously not into technology, Eduardo thought, or they might have noticed Mark Zuckerberg pretending to be his ex-best friend. He didn’t mention this, settling for the next obvious question. “Why are you here?”

“I...I still need you,” Mark virtually whispered, the pain of having to admit this tainting every syllable. He paused, as if waiting for Eduardo’s input, but it didn’t come. The buzzing sound of a TV in a nearby room echoed in their silence. “I never stopped needing you. Not just to make me eat and sleep, I have assistants to check up on that now, but just you.”

He sounded uncertain, nervous, not the Mark who spoke at you and barely noticed what you said. An image rose in his mind, that night in California, dripping onto the floor as Mark told him he’d get left behind.

_“I want--I want--I need you out here, please don’t tell him I said that.”_

“I fought it,” Mark continued, even more frantic. “I told myself I didn’t need you, but you knew it, you were the one person who really mattered. And you still are. I can’t put on a fake smile and pretend there was never anything between us, because it’s ridiculous. I...I was an idiot.” Mark falters, stumbling on the words that take so much effort to say, the admission that he’s not always right.

“We were both idiots,” Eduardo states simply, before turning and walking back into his room, leaving the door open. Mark, for once, takes the hint and follows.

“Wardo,” he says, that familiar sound Eduardo’s been waiting to hear so long, had given up on in favour of creating a wall to hide behind. In a second, they’re together, kissing, nothing like the lazy ones that used to happen at Kirkland, but desperate, passionate, full of unspoken apologies they’ll have to vocalise later. For now, however, they’re reconnecting, beginning that process of reorienting their spheres, in a new way, because they can’t fall back into the old ways as they no longer exist. No one said their lines couldn’t become entangled again, after all.


End file.
